Hacker Culture A to Z

Chapter 5. E

Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts (EA) is one of the most profitable brands in the video game industry. Its founder, William Murray “Trip” Hawkins III, was a hacker who started his career at Apple.

Hawkins told Jeffrey Fleming of GameDeveloper.com how he went from being an early Apple employee to launching one of the world’s largest video game publishers:

In the summer of 1975, I learned about the invention of the microprocessor and about the first retail store where a consumer could rent a timesharing terminal to use from home. That very day I committed to found EA in 1982. I figured that it would take seven years for enough computing hardware to get into homes to create an audience for the computer games that I wanted to make. When I finished my education in 1978, I got a job at Apple. When I started there, we had only fifty employees and had sold only 1,000 computers in the history of the company, most of them in the prior year. Four years later, we were a Fortune 500 company with 4,000 employees and nearing $1 billion in annual revenue.

Sequoia Capital, of Menlo Park, California, was instrumental in setting up EA as a business, providing initial financing and even office space when the company first incorporated as Amazin’ Software in 1982. Later that year, the company changed its name to Electronic Arts.

Hawkins envisioned his game developers as “software artists,” and the earliest EA titles (like Hard Hat Mack, Pinball Construction Set, and Archon) were released ...